Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Computer experts have long warned about a catastrophic cyber-attack in the US, a sort of Web 3.0 version of 9/11 that would wreak enormous damage throughout the country. Like most Americans, I shrugged. With all of the enormous resources the country enjoys, those warnings seemed like the rantings of a digital Chicken Little. Oddly enough,…
Welcome to the age of hackable automobiles, when two security researchers can cause a 1.4 million product recall. On Friday, Chrysler announced that it’s issuing a formal recall for 1.4 million vehicles that may be affected by a hackable software vulnerability in Chrysler’s Uconnect dashboard computers. The vulnerability was first demonstrated to WIRED by security…
I was driving 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold. Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio switched…
From Gawker to Ashley Madison, moralizers are punishing private people in public for adultery. Since when does the Internet care so much about monogamy? On Friday, Gawker published a post alleging that a Condé Nast executive tried to arrange an evening with a gay escort. Now, a hacker or group of hackers calling themselves The…
Huge database hacks are now so common that there is a secondary industry of credit and identity-fraud protection services. It’s almost a form of theater by now. The typical sequence is: A massive company fails to secure your data, and a hacking group copies that data without permission; The breach is discovered either by internal…
It was the video that showed Islamic State soldiers burning a Jordanian pilot alive inside a cage that propelled former beauty queen Lara Abdallat to get involved in the fight against the militant group. “It was a wake-up call for many of us, and a call to action,” the former Miss Jordan and hactivist for GhostSec…
The Bitcoin network is being hammered by a massive spam attack, and the targets now include WikiLeaks and Voat, the upstart Reddit clone that became a home for Redditors fleeing the site after new anti-harassment policies were instituted. The onslaught began earlier this week, when thousands of tiny Bitcoin transactions—called “dust”—were sent across the network…
Twitter has spent the last 12 hours mockingly asking if Hacking Team was awake yet, but the firm’s massive data breach reveals a more serious side to the PR disaster — deals allegedly between Hacking Team and oppressive governments. HACKING TEAM BREACH TIMELINE Over the weekend, the secretive Hacking Team security firm was the victim…
The murders of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, last week put a bright spotlight on white supremacists who use the Internet to organize, proselytize, and radicalize—a process that ended in bloodshed when 21-year-old Dylann Roof allegedly went on a killing spree motivated by racism. The massacre has returned scrutiny to white supremacist communities…
Screenshot/Last Week TonightDear Good People of the U.S. who want to stop The Bad Things from Happening: Great! I, too, want to stop The Bad Things from happening. Most people do. But we have got to talk about this impulse to accomplish good things by simply making all the bad things into federal crimes. It’s…